Tom's Two Cents : Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner is not a familiar name in 20th century literary annals, though he probably should be. He is part of that second-tier group of mid-century writers that included William Styron, John Updike, and others, who were highly respected for their craft, but who did not make it into the top literary critical echelon.  Were they good?  You bet—maybe at times better than the critical darlings like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.  Stegner was a mid-westerner, who ultimately settled in California, where he taught creative writing for a good many years, producing writer/students like our own Larry McMurtry.  His last two novels, this one, and his last, Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer, are considered his best, although there is a respectable body of work before that.

Crossing to Safety touched a particular chord in me.  The principal characters are two couples, Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally, couples who meet in the 30’s, both men striving for position and tenure in a small New England college, where they form an enduring friendship.  This academic scene took me immediately back to my first four years of teaching English at Southern Methodist, fraught with all the same positives and negatives, especially those of a would-be creative writer, striving for recognition in a field, English, that normally came from publishing critical essays, not poems or stories or novels.  Larry, who tells this story, becomes a successful novelist, as he watches his conflicted colleague, Sid, a “wannabe” poet, being pushed into Traditional Academia by his ambitious wife, Charity, the central focus of this novel, even though her female foil, Sally, seems to have a much more momentous problem in her lifelong struggle with polio.

Charity, who seems to have few problems, is the focus of this novel, and we all know her type, indeed we may be her type, live with her type, or struggle with friends of her type.  She is the Classic Control Freak, who must, simply MUST, manage everyone’s life to the nth degree.  To compound the frustration of dealing with her, she is also smart, loving and generous to a fault. Stegner beautifully traces the relationship of these four to its final conclusion.  Though this book is short on plot and long on the subtlety of its character relationships, it is beautifully written in the kind of prose one seldom finds anymore and substantive in its praise of enduring friendship, the thing, as Robert Frost is quoted from, that “I have crossed to safety with” and “what I would not part with” that “I have kept.”